Homesick?

Feels like all I talk about lately is New York.

Its like that scene in Mean Girls when pre-cocaine Lindsay Lohan is talking to her friend about how much she hates Rachel McAdams and that's ALL she talks about. I guess its not entirely inaccurate to say New York is that hot girl in school that's also a bully and who is absolutely fascinating for some reason.

Below are the links for the respective articles. Two out of three are about food (surprise, surprise). And, not gonna lie, pretty excited to go visit the city in October on the heels of my London trip.

How to Fall in Love with a Place

The river split the city in two while ornate bridges worked like stitches connecting one half to the other. The spired Parliament building led the façade that eventually spread out into the tapestry of short, grey buildings that were Pest. Behind us on the Buda side, the red clay roofed houses suggested a fairy tale town that was more show than substance. I was sitting with Tünde, my Hungarian friend, at the top of Buda Castle, getting a run down on why Pest is infinitely cooler than Buda.

I tried to carefully observe all the miniscule structures that created the labyrinth that is Pest, the mix of architectures, the flowing river that reminded me of the Spree, the Seine, the Río Grande de Loiza— all while sitting on a Castle-Cathedral that was a distant cousin of the one I’d visited a few days earlier in Prague. That day my friend Nick had noted with frustration how impossible it is to see every beautiful thing, every detail, take in every element that together creates the whole that is immediately, but vaguely, beautiful.

Drinking and Travel

Most nights started with a box of wine. They cost the equivalent of 50 cents down at the potraviny—the Czech version of a New York deli—and were the perfect pregame agents. My flatmates would cut a corner off the top and insert a straw, drinking it like a box of juice while they applied make up, swapped shoes, and tried on new dresses and shirts. When they eventually got to the club they would have a shot or six of becherovka or vodka, followed by several large pints of excellent beer. And this was their routine every night for four months.

5 Food Places I Wish I’d Taken Advantage of When I Lived in New York

I don’t miss living in New York. It’s a difficult, cold city if you’re not head over heels in love with it. But I also think back on all the missed opportunities—the places I now wish were only a $2.50 subway ride away from me, the flavors and atmospheres I missed and the ones I should’ve been devoted to instead of wasting my time on… other places I don’t currently miss or even remember.

While I won’t get that era of my life back, I know where to go when I visit. And I visit a lot.

Things Change

Things change, and one thing that seems to change consistently is the name of this blog. And I’m not going to apologize for that. Currently its taking on its third and probably most drastic transformation, which only makes sense since 2010 has so far, for its author, been a year of drastic transformations.

Spanish Hamburger

I'm not really a vegetarian. R's stepmother was the first to point this out to me during a rather tense dinner during a rather tense trip to Bali. My sweet, charming "mom-in-law," who I got along with as famously as territorial cats get along with each other, said she didn't see how only eating fish qualified me as a vegetarian because she also only ate fish and didn't call herself a vegetarian. I decided to give her match point and ordered the filet mignon. I try not to be a sore loser.

But she did make a point and I think many "vegetarians" such as myself have tried to cover up the ifs and buts and onlys of their diet by inventing all sorts of terms like "pescaterian" and "locavore." At the end of the day, you're still killing an animal for food and crowning yourself humane just because its not a cow. So why did I, and to an extent still do, call myself a vegetarian?

Culintro Panel Series: The Future of Food Journalism

Print is dead. Film is dead. We might as well be all-inclusive: media is dead. As a former filmmaker, I’ve heard similar laments: the future of sitting in a dark room with a large screen is constantly being questioned and the coming of YouTube was hailed as the end of a profession. Now an aspiring food writer, I recognize a similar environment of fear and doubt present in the publishing world. As Bob Dylan aptly pointed out, “The times they are a-changing.”

To get a better perspective, I recently attended a panel called The Future of Food Journalism, hosted by Culintro. I was particularly intrigued by their choice of panelists. Rather than sitting down the editors of Conde Nast’s food magazines or former restaurant critics, Culintro invited the food editor of Time Out New York Gabriella Gershenson, senior food editor of Salon.com Francis Lam, Tasting Table creator Nick Fauchald, and Edible New York/ Brooklyn/ East End magazine’s Brian Halweil. Young, niche, community-based writers and editors in the midst of a changing industry so I felt hopeful about what news they would bring from the trenches.

Understandably, though, the moderator, food historian Andrew F. Smith, began the evening on a bit of a gloom and doom note by talking about the folding of Gourmet magazine. The big question was the first question he threw at the panel, starting with former Gourmet editor Francis Lam: Is print dead?

Tito- Cuento ganador del Certamen de El Nuevo Dia

This story won the Certamen de Cuento de El Nuevo Día 2009, along with Cezanne Cardona's El silencio de Mefisto. You can bug him to put his on his blog. Here for your enjoyment (Spanish-speakers only, I'm afraid) is Tito.

Tito

Por Andrea Moya

Titubeando por el calor húmedo de una ciudad ajena, Tito fuma sin inhalar. El cigarrillo le guinda del labio como el palo de una paleta le guinda a un niño haciendo como si fumara. Los letreros en chino son una anomalía cotidiana que nunca fallan en hacerle sonreír sin proponérselo. Es la persona más alta en su canto de calle y se mueve a un ritmo distinto al torrente de personas que chocan contra sus piernas, sus brazos, se lo llevan por el medio.

Desde el primer día se había sentido en su casa aunque fuera de su casa. Él era así desde chiquito, más cómodo tirado en el sofá jugando con el Playstation de su amigo y cenando con los vecinos, que estando en su propia casa, comiendo con su propia familia. Nueva York lo llevaba esperando con los brazos abiertos hacía tiempo ya. Al fin decidió tirársela por eso de, y a ver cómo se las hacía para no perder la cordura, el sabor y el ritmo, y el anhelo del regreso que es patrimonio de su cultura fugaz.

Porque a Tito disque no le importa eso. Tiene el cool muy alto, muy desarrollado para sentirse extranjero. Por eso, después de aterrizar en Kennedy, Terminal 5, JetBlue, se metió en Chinatown, el pueblo de inmigrantes donde todo el mundo viene de otro lao, y nadie pertenece. Es como un pueblo transitorio que lleva ya cien años en transición pero sin llegar a un acuerdo en cuanto a donde coño quieren ir. Vino ese día a comer perro con salsa soya y tofú y se quedó. Después de cuatro meses fumaba más para protegerse contra la peste a pescado y basura que por adicción. En ese rincón de todo lo sucio y olvidado en Nueva York tenía su casa, un estudio más closet que cuarto, donde un matres, un tocador y un “hot plate” compartían el piso sucio que no barría nunca porque no le cabía una escoba. No era su casa en Dorado ni la casa de sus padres en Montehiedra pero era pleno Manhattan y completa libertad. Esa libertad que se forja cuando uno voluntariamente abandona la comodidad.

Caminando por la calle empinada y estrecha, casi solo, con la excepción del vagabundo que yacía casi vivo junto a sus Adidas, le entra uno de esos toques filosóficos que transitan con las brizas contaminadas de esa ciudad de artistas y financieros. Todos pagamos un precio por lo que ya nos pertenece, se dice sin rencor ni malas mañas. Todo en la vida es alquile, se dice sonriendo.

The Future of Food Journalism

With an imminent relocation from New York to Austin, monthly metro card to auto insurance, from aspiring filmmaker to aspiring food writer, I bought a seat to a panel called The Future of Food Journalism. I wanted to know what I was getting myself into and, with a cocktail hour preceding the event, I thought maybe I could make some connections on the way. I even packed some business cards (the ones for the company I no longer work for, still, business cards). But the mass of people I came upon when I came through the glass doors of Culintro, the venue hosting the event, put a stop to any delusion I had of talking to anyone that night. Not while wearing snow boots and a shirt from K-mart anyway. This panel was already proving to be informative.

Networking is the bread and butter of the freelancer and I was learning how to do it by making a series of mistakes. Lesson one: dress well. Lesson two: bring writing utensils. Lesson three: get your business cards up to date. Lesson four: talk to people. While lesson four was being forced upon me (someone sat down next to me and started talking to me, prompting me to respond) the panel, finally, started.

The industry professionals who would be talking to us tonight included: Gabriella Gersherson from Time Out New York, Nick Fauchald of Tasting Table, Francis Lam of Salon.com, and Eric Halweil of the Edible magazines. It was the quality of the panel that had sparked my interest in the first place. I was expecting very gloom and doom prophesying on the death of food writing (akin to my professor David Leite's slap across the face to my food writing class: "You can't make a living doing this.") but hoped for good news. The moderator, Andrew F. Smith, gave a short intro centered around the folding of Gourmet magazine and started off by asking Francis Lam, a former Gourmet editor, if he thought print was dead. Francis' answered with another question, "What is print? Do you mean paper?" Or writing in general? This was an interesting distinction that became a central topic during the discussion.

Food writing is more popular than ever (similarly film box office numbers broke records during a horrible recession yet people are still lamenting the death of film) and what's been happening is that the industry is reinventing itself by embracing new tendencies in the demands of their readers (which in turn satisfy the needs of advertisers):

Shorter attention spans (because of getting most information from a screen) means shorter articles. The days of 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 word pieces and leisurely entering into a story are over. "You gotta give them the sex upfront," said Nick Fauchald, whose entire publication is email-based. Now you get 800 words if you're lucky.

People now want to experience/make/visit what you are writing about rather than just be satisfied reading about it. This has in turn given way to the success of smaller, more community-based publications, niche publications, and an abundance of recipe resources. The Edible magazines, which are small city by city magazines are basically given away at strategic locations but are doing very well economically. Meanwhile, bigger, national publications are straining under their own weight as subscriptions are down (because so much is available for free on the internet) and advertisers go with the numbers. Which leads to the next point...

He who fails to embrace the web is destined to perish. Even Gabriella Gershenson, who is food editor for a print magazine (to which R and I subscribe to) admits that while she received Gourmet in the mail, she read it mostly online. "I'm both helping and killing this medium," she admitted. Gabriella told of when she was hired as a staff writer at Time Out (a position that rarely exists anymore, ergo the need for networking) and how different the goals and priorities of the magazine were back then. She remembers having no web responsibilities whatsoever. But where Time Out has succeeded (and where Conde Nast has failed) is that they did not go into denial about the power of the internet and how important it would be to their magazine's survival. They recognized that print and web are friends. They feed each other and there are things you can do on the web that you simply can't on paper. It's telling that the day Francis Lam was let go from Gourmet (along with the rest of the staff), he was hired by Salon.com.

Those were some of the key points about how food writing was going to live on, but inevitably the question of money, and specifically paying writers came up. Food writers are famously underpaid, having to teach, write books, and become editors (or marry rich) to be able to do what they love. Things have only gotten worse because of the free for all that is the internet. Tasting Table and Salon pay their freelance writers but that's an anomaly. Most websites want writers to work for free, paying them $50 is they're lucky. Meanwhile the bigger publications have brought their rates down considerably. While this question wasn't fully addressed (its hard to answer something nobody knows yet), I did get the impression that we're that much closer to the answer. That the panel was composed of (young) people who were making a living at this particular profession and who have embraced the change of tides that come with innovation, is a clear indication that its still possible to make a living as a food writer. There's also the fact that with the New York Times setting up a paywall on their site, a precedent may be set that, if it sticks, might be what the web-publications need to be able to shell out cash for better work. More importantly, a demand is in place for the product food writers peddle and people are working with creating new ways of selling it (I think Tasting Table is a great example of that).

But in response to the question of print, of magazines, of paper, Francis told the story of a man he met at a bar who spoke very sensuously (Francis admitted the man may very well have been trying to pick him up) about the experience of reading magazines and his love of magazines. And when the audience was asked if they would take the iPad to bed to read, barely anyone raised their hand. When asked if they would take a magazine or a book, it was almost unanimous. What gives me hope is knowing that these questions are not exclusive to one particular form of media. In film, the question of 35mm versus HD, seeing movies in a theater versus on Blu-Ray, the rebirth of indie film without studio involvement, hell, the moneyless film world of Youtube, are all weighing down on the industry but people are figuring it out. The music industry still exists, even after Napster and Pandora.

Overall, it was a very informative evening and while of course there are still questions up in the air, I had a sense that I knew what to expect, both in my pursuit of food writing as a career and as a networking freelancing writer. After the panel, I walked into Grand Central station and couldn't help stopping by the newsstand and showing my support. $10 for two magazines, how much cheaper do you want it to be?

Home's Cooking

I'm getting the impression that the only culture that truly accepts vegetables as food and not seasoning for meat is the Indian culture and the liberal urban well-to-do hippie culture. And my cat, Tito. Or maybe I've decided to make a sweeping generalization because I've been living in a bubble of Hispanic and Middle-American culture for the past week. Or because I've frequently been attacked by some of my close friends (Mexican, Guyanese, Libyan, respectively) for proposing that meat, like cookies, is a "sometimes food." Or maybe its just them and my family who regard me as the vegetable-eating black sheep. Like my cat, Tito.

Circumstances have conspired against me, and high cholesterol or not, I've been in a meat-induced high for days. Texas was only different because my sister-in-law humored me and let me add some braised cabbage and a salad to the Thanksgiving menu.

Vegetables just aren't part of my family's gastronomic repertoire and they aren't really part of Puerto Rican culture's repertoire either. The Puerto Rican diet consists of fast food, plastic wrapped cookies from boxes, chips, meat, rice and beans, root vegetables like potato, yuca, calabasa, either fried or boiled, meat, bread, cold cuts, meat, some heavy pastas like lasagna or spaghetti bolognes, pasteles (which are like tamales made with plantains and meat), and did I mention meat? Now, don't get me wrong, Puerto Rican food is delicious, so delicious in fact that vegetables actually taste boring, even nasty, in comparison to its meaty, fatty goodness. Take my brother.

My younger brother, whose body is composed primarily of burgers, decided to try salad for the first time during Thanksgiving because he found a dressing that reminded him of the Sweet Onion sauce from Subway. He took one bite of spinach and tomato and spit it out immediately, swearing to never to eat salad again.   

Going back to my sweeping generalization, there is a cultural defensiveness that comes over people when you threaten their meat consumption. I'm obviously discarding from this equation vegetarians, Indian people, French people (the bastards), and anyone who has ever lived in New York or California. But most typical, traditional, family meals have some sort of meat at their center. I understand that urge to anchor down a plate with a protein.


Since I started eating meat again I've realized how nice, how complete a dinner feels when you can include some sort of well-seasoned, tender animal flesh along with your vegetables. I usually try to make due with just with cheese or eggs but nothing really beats the saltiness, the firm texture, and the fullness that comes with eating meat, be it chicken, red meat, pork, or fish. I mean, what plant could ever replace the sweet-salty-perfect flavor of bacon?

But above and beyond the physical addiction that the utter and thorough deliciousness of well-prepared meat created in the human brain and body, there is also an entitlement that comes down from as far back as the cave paintings where picture-stories about packs of men hunting of bison, mammoths, and tigers decorated stone walls. Consider the Greek and Roman orgies where the blood of cattle flowed or the simple peasant's sacrificial lamb offered up the gods then greedily consumed by the worshipper. Hindu and Christian fasting usually consists of abstinence from meat and alcohol, Muslim fasting culminates in massive, meaty feasts, and all holidays have an animal assigned to them.

Unfortunately, unlike the warring Greeks, the nomadic tribes of cavemen, or the peasants, physical labor has all but disappeared from daily life as medical science has ballooned over the decisions people make about what to eat. And medical science is under the constant assault of the industrialized meat industry and the stubbornness of traditions. Trandition and money met and as they say in Spanish, el amor y el interés fueron al campo un día... (love and private interests went to the country one day...)

As I learned from Michael Pollan, the meat industry lobbied long and hard against the discovery that doctors made several decades ago that over-consumption of meat was responsible for the number one cause of preventable death: heart disease. The meat lobbyist weren't buying it so they demanded the scientists boil it down to something they could work with. So the white coats determined that it was the fat in the meat that caused high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high rates of preventable death. The meat lobbyists thought it over, nodded, and went to press with the story: Fat is Evil! And so was born the fat-free industry. Everybody wins.

Well, guess what's fat free. That's right. Because of the lack of government subsidizing which make them expensive and their more complex flavors which make them challenging, vegetables need to step up their game in order to beat this iron-clad money-tradition meat combo. I propose a few ways to counter the meat monopoly over the gastronomic preferences of the world:

1) Visit New York with someone who has lived there. California works too.
2) Eat Indian food.
3) Pick one day a week to not eat meat.

This last one I'm stealing from a litany of food writers who are better versed than me on this subject. But the brilliance of this suggestions, beyond its obvious health and environmental benefits, it also creates the ideal scenario of invention by necessity. You can do as much and often more with vegetables than you can with meat. If you're looking for a starting point, create traditional meals with meat but add vegetables you've never tried or prepare vegetables you know in a way you're not used to. If you want to go a step further eliminate the meat from the center and make up for it with new dishes of vegetables (use cheese and eggs if you're scared). For the more adventurous I recommend experimentation with curry, cumin, cayenne, and tumeric. Once you go down this road, you'll never go back. The point? Just try new things.

Be like Tito.

Bready Goodness

I currently work next to Amy's Bread in the West Village. While this shop also boasts some pretty incredible-looking cookies, cupcakes, muffins, scones, and sandwiches, they really make some stand out bread. What's wonderful about working next to Amy's is that I've realized that bread is not just bread. Bread is white, whole wheat, multigrain, pumpernickel, brioche, croissant, sobao, de agua, Italian, French, black, potato, Challah, and comes in the form of loafs, bagels, nan, rolls, pizza, sticks, toast... Bread is the backbone of culture (where bread is not found in prominence, rice will often make an appearance, but even those cultures have some sort of bread). You can even have it as a drink in the form of beer (every culture has beer). Its as universal as marriage and dessert.

Lately I've opted for more savory baked goods as my mid-afternoon, I'm-going-cross-eyed-but-have-no-desire-for-coffee pick-me-ups and for some reason I feel guiltier after eating two bread twists or half a mini-loaf of some delicious bread (they even contain seeds and healthy things like that) than if I'd eaten a whole chocolate chip cookie from Jacques Torres or City Bakery (big, big cookies full of butter and chocolate). And I'm slightly outraged by this. I've fallen into the cultural trap of hating bread. I've been well-aware of this for many years but I really thought I was over it. I want to make a case for modern Americans, myself included, not to hate bread.

For centuries bread has been close to holy. Challah is eaten on high holy days and blessings are read over loaves as big as a medium-sized dogs. To invite someone to break bread with you is an indication of trust and affection. Everything cool that has been invented is called the best thing since sliced bread. For so many years bread in America was as wholesome as white bread.

In the Middle East, bread is eaten with every meal even if that meal already includes rice or couscous or pasta. In Ethiopia it replaces cutlery. Even in Europe bread is a daily part of life. For breakfast, for lunch, for dinner as baguettes, sandwiches, or creating a bread crumb and cheese crust over a cassoulet or a gratin. My friend Marc, whose culinary habits I find intensely curious specifically because he is French, would sometimes eat nothing but a bagel all day. Then have another one with us after several rounds of beer. Bread and peanut butter were his food of choice. And yes he was skinny (stupid French people).

Bread often makes top ten lists of favorite things about being alive. A warm loaf out of the oven, the smell of bakeries, the way butter melts and becomes yellow and liquid on softly browned toast, the tart crust and the soft sweet insides. They look attractive, be it speckled with whole wheat, dark and black, pure white and yellow, their insides flaky or crumbly, magically leavened by yeast. So what happened, people? Bread was been basterdized (like everything else was) by the food and diet industries.

I started making my own bread recently because I wanted to save money and because I really

don't like it when things in my life are too easy. The ingredients in the recipe I found include whole wheat, yeast, honey, salt, milk, eggs. A stark contrast to the bread I would buy at the supermarket that for some reason contained high fructose corn syrup, sugar, natural flavors, and coloring. The good news is that like everything (the best thing to happens to organics since profits), certain brands are embracing the Obama-Vegetable-Garden, celebrity chef with a cause, 20 and 30-something-year-old urbanite mentality that processed food should still be food and taste good, so you're seeing a drastic reduction in their ingredients lists. Score one for bread! But why is bread still the bad guy?

Basically, bread still hasn't found its margarine.

Back in the days before trans-fats, butter became Public Enemy Number One and margarine came on the scene as the savior of both our taste buds and our arteries. Of course chemically produced spread made with hydrogenated oils were better than rendered dairy solids! Except, they were better in the way that guns are better than knives. Once margarine was ousted as the real enemy of your heart, butter came back into the good graces of the public or at the very least stop being attacked.

Since Atkins, bread has not found a satisfactory scapegoat to blame fatness on because the problem is Atkins actually worked. It didn't work the way Atkins followers believed it worked (all they were really losing was water), but people were becoming thinner. And while nutritionists brought people down from the bacon and eggs enduced highs and told them they needed to start eating fruits and vegetables again, bread remained black listed. It feels too filling, you know? It expands in your stomach. Its so easy to overeat it. Yes. But you can say that about anything we like to call food, specially if it contains sugar, alcohol, or cheese.

At the height of my own diet-craze I came to stark realization: What's life without sugar, alcohol, and cheese? Dull. And living without bread, while it would mean I would be skinny, would also mean missing out on one of the better things in life. I don't have to eat it three times a day but why feel bad if I do? We eat corn flakes, for god's sake, and that doesn't make any sense either if you think about it nutritionally and in terms of flavor.

So go out right now and eat some bread! And I'm not talking the sliced stuff from the supermarket. There are still bakeries in abundance. Don't worry, you'll walk it off on the way there.

Candy

Halloween has passed and the leftover debris of that nigh of sugar and alcohol fueled debauchery now sit in neat little boxes at office reception areas where people waiting pick at fun sized bags of chocolate and candy. They don't serve the leftover alcohol at these reception areas because there wasn't any leftover alcohol. But post-Halloween candy is always in abundance. As kids we understood that that was the whole point. On Halloween you created a stash, a bag or a bucket full of refined sugar, something to hold us over until Thanksgiving. But now candy is bad.
Except its really not.

Candy is such a visceral experience, innocent as childhood, fun, impulsive, pointless, and sweeeeeet. The stigma around it is undeserved, I feel. The only reason kids binge on candy is because they are not allowed to have it or they are allowed to have too much of it. Instead of celebrating it as a treat, kids scream and kick and demand it when they pass it at the pharmacy or supermarket or deli, and if parents give in or if kids are forced to sneak candy on they side, they gorge on it, taking its delicate magic for granted. This is not the kids' fault. Kids don't understand the consequences of too much of a good thing they just know what they love. Parents in this age of over-abundance have forgotten how to eat properly or they eat too properly, so they are rendered useless when it comes to teaching their child how to eat candy properly, and there is a way. Candy is an impulsive desire, a rush of happiness that should be savored not abused, and that becomes deadened if candy is handed out too often or not at all. The easiest solution would be to have more candy stores and less candy aisles.

New York City has several candy meccas: Dylan's Candy Bar, Economy Candy, the Hershey Store, and Max Brenner. Other notable candy shops I've visited are The Olde Candy Shoppe in Boston, with walls lined up to the ceiling with jars of candy and eccentric antiques like stuffed leopards and weird lamps; a candy store in Madrid that had every inch of wall covered with displays of colorful, barely identifiable candy, dried fruit, and nuts, and of course the candy store in the biggest mall in the Caribbean, Plaza las Americas, where as a child I would always buy a bag of gummy worms and eat them as I followed my mom and my aunt to boring stores. What they all have in common: sheer, beautiful, colorful quantity and variety.

Candy stores, like Halloween, are once in a while explorations. To do them more often than once is to kill their magic, which is exactly what the overabundance of candy aisles has done. They create the possibility of candy so often that a treat becomes a threat. There is something incredibly thrilling about seeing stacks and stacks of candy, gummy bears, coconut chocolate turtles, sour patch kids, twizlers, malt balls, hard candies, M&M's arranged in blues, reds, pinks, yellows, greens, gummy sharks, chocolate-covered peanuts... it goes on and on and on... then dipping a small shovel into a chosen bin and scooping out loot. Once again you're creating a stash. Its like a mini-Halloween, an event and a trip, instead of a bad idea. Because the other thing these stacks and stacks of candy do to a child is they overwhelm them. They couldn't possibly have all of it, much less stuff it all into a bag, so they become selective. They create assortments that won't bleed into the rest of the week because the portion control is built in and more than anything they are getting exactly what they want.

So if you want to boycott anything, boycott the candy aisles and large bags of generic candy shit. Get the good stuff. Its a bit of a walk (all candy stores require a bit of a walk) and the quality is infinitely better. And if you need a fix now, don't go downstairs to the deli, just visit the reception area. They usually have a little bowl of sin taunting the poor receptionist. Or, you know, have a cookie.

Disaster and Redemption

I've had a few disasters happen in the kitchen, and though none involved fire, broken limbs, or deep, hospital-enducing burns, none has ever been quite as disastrous as my attempt to make Day of the Dead Bread. I've tried making pumpkin fritters that disintegrated, I've made bread that tastes like yeast, I've burned onions to the point of being inedible, those would all qualify as run of the mill "fails." This sweet bread was what the internet calls an "epic fail," a train wreck in slow motion, and I knew it had the potential for failure from the very beginning yet I held out hoping beyond hope that it would work out. I figured if it failed to be bread it could at least be cake, at least it can taste sweet and delicious even if its rocks hard and dense. No, I was wrong.

The problem was two-fold and it involved the yin and yang of cooking: heat and cold. My first mistake was to mix scalding hot milk milk fresh off the stove with delicate, vulnerable active yeast. I never read this but learned through osmosis from my boss that high heat kills yeast yet all recipes

involving yeast require lukewarm water. I failed to put these two pieces of information together and ended up trying to get a three from the equation 1+1. I had unwarranted faith in my two packets of yeast, I believed they would fight and prevail, like when you go to a holiday dinner and promise yourself you won't overeat or drink too much. There's certain thing that science simply does not allow. The second mistake was an honest one and once again, my boss called it. Following the advice of my now two most trusted cooking gurus, Bittman and Smitten, and in consideration of limited weekday time, I decided to let it rise "overnight" (

while I was at work) since I've heard doing that allows the dough to absorb flavors better. I don't think that works with this bread, granted it would've been nice if it had rising agents to begin with. But when I took it out of the fridge and felt the cold sticky dough I knew I'd put the

last nail into this experiment's coffin. I went through the motions, fingers still crossed, I even pretended to let it rise one more time, glazed it, baked it. We didn't cut into it until next morning because I needed to photograph it for F&F. While very pretty on the outside, inside it looked like something dead. It seemed to have not cooked through so the innards were an uneven, white-ish-yellow-ish color even though the exterior had browned. It was cold, too, and damp. R wanted to try it, also hoping that maybe it would taste good, but I didn't even let him. It didn't taste like anything, cardboard maybe. I threw it out.

I think the epic fail of this dead Day of the Dead bread inspired me, though, to make something bigger, better and also very time consuming and hard to make. A winter squash was sitting in my fridge for a couple of weeks asking me to do something with it, throwing out suggestions like soup, sautee, beans... But at the end I decided I wanted to stand in front of a stove for an hour stirring rice.

Squash Risotto.

Luckily I had a helper. No, not R, he would make guest appearances whenever I yelled at him

across the apartment to come cut the parsley or grind some cheese amid protests of I'm almost done with my work (lies). No, there's a reason kitchens are mostly staffed with Hispanics. My friend D, who inhaled a quesadilla in front of me while I sliced into the squash with the biggest knife I own. ("It's like cracking open a skull," said D, his face covered in cheese and guac, "just straight in and then down." I've cracked skull before, thank you very much.) I designated half of the squash to the rissotto and the other half to Tortitas de Calabaza, or Pumpkin fritters (in PR we think squash is pumpkin, but that's OK).

A word on Tortitas de Calabaza. For some children it was freshly baked cookies, for others hot cocoa, or a warm pie, or something else you can buy in a box and heat up. For me-- and I know I'm not alone in this because I got the recipe from a close friend of mine-- it was Tortitas de Calabaza. They're basically fritters: fried dough, except these are made with "pumpkin," brown sugar, and cinnamon. As I mentioned earlier, my first attempt at making these was disastrous. I was inventing the recipe and had no idea what I was doing. The dough disintegrated in the hot oil and I had throw away the whole mess. Flour and egg yolk are key, I discovered. I mean who needs nutritional value when you have a crispy exterior and a chewy interior and its fried? Its my childhood, dammit!

But I digress. D and I were in the kitchen for almost two hours making these two squash-laden dishes. The risotto took twice as long as it normally would and about a chicken's worth of chicken broth because I made the mistake of using brown rice. It really does seem the moment you try to add nutritional value to anything traditional it just ruins it somehow. People in China worked very hard to eat white rice for a reason. But it was the choice between long-grain risotto and short-grain brown rice risotto, we all have our choice to make in life. The consequence of this was that the squash almost completely dissolved into the sauce, thickening and sweetening it to astronomical proportions. It was almost too sweet at the end, though still delicious, and it was the first time I was the one to grab salt and pepper and doused something I'd made with it. Balance is important: heat and cold, sweet and savory, healthy and awesome. And yes, the tortitas were perfect-- can't go wrong with white flour, egg yolk, and sugar fried in oil, specially when there's squash involved. D fried them to their precise color, a dark, golden brown, some developed shapes like hearts or ghosts, they were sweet without being overly sweet, the perfect side dish dessert. (In case you were wondering, yes, I was fat as a child.) Between the three of us we ate an entire winter squash in one dinner. It was glorious.

My previously mixed feeling about the fall-- cold, short days, too much clothes, the official beginning of the eating season (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas)-- have been giving way to a true appreciation of it. The days are brisk and chilly which for the first time in my life I'm genuinely enjoying, the seasonal produce is outstanding, and its the official beginning of the eating season (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas). I think after this dinner I've officially been converted to loving fall. Winter is going to take a little more effort.

** Note: None of the pictures are mine, they were pulled from the web.

5 am: Thinking About Anise

I woke up around 4:30 am and could not go back to sleep. There's a somewhat ambitious project coming my way later today which is keeping me up. It involves 4 hours of work (ok, 2 1/2 of those require me to do nothing and I could even just let the thing happen overnight, but still, 4 hours!!!), it needs to be photographed and then written about, and then eaten. It involves a spice that is all but new to me, anise seeds. I've only ever known anise as a liqueur used in Spanish cooking so the the smell of these little seeds brings me visions of Roscón and Easter and the taste of sweet licorice embedded in a warm sweet bread encrusted in sugar and dotted with dried fruit and almonds. Spanish cooking at its very best. What I plan to make is only once removed from that. Its a Mexican sweet bread called Pan de Día de los Muertos (or Day of the Dead Bread). I'll post about it tomorrow when I make it.

Now I'm not doing this for myself. Squash and blue cheese pizza, I do for myself. Homemade whole wheat bread, I do for myself. Apple crisp, I do for myself. This is a project for work, which is another reason I'm up thinking about anise. I'm mentally writing my article, having decided on a new approach to this once annoying, now approaching cool website I work for called Fabulous & Frugal. At this point its smeared with enough of my writing that I'm starting to care for it. I'm particularly proud of my beer article and Part Two of the Student Loans trilogy (I don't pick the titles). So I want to start applying what I learned during my food writing course and start to incorporate structure into my articles as mindfully as I would if I were writing something for the New York Times (no, I'm not comparing Fab & Fru to the New York Times, one is my current place of employment, the other an aspiration, ok?). Lede, nutgraf, body, close.

While thinking about the lede I realized something that makes Day of the Dead Bread particular, specially when made within the context of American culture: its sweet (and it contains anise, but that's what makes it particular to me). Even Jewish Challah and Americanized French Croissants don't quite make it to the sweetness level inherent in Iberian and Hispanic sweet breads. Roscón is a classic example. My best friend's mother, originally from Galicia, makes these bread cakes every Easter and every Three Kings Day. The texture is bready and flaky but the intensity is that of pastry glazed with granulated sugar and liqueur because even confectioner's sugar would be too light. Not that confectioner's sugar doesn't have its place. Take the Puerto Rican majorca, even when you eat it with ham and cheese its still sprinkled with white dusty sugar. The Portuguese have their own sweet bread, Massa Sovada, and like Roscón and Day of the Dead Bread, its baked mostly for Easter and Christmas. I would say, though, that Massa Sovada is closer to Puerto Rican Pan Sobao, a bread that's sweet but still more bread than cake. In any case, both are still sweeter than anything found in the American spectrum of breads. [Correction: I glanced at the backcover of my latest issue of Cook's Illustrated and prominently displayed was the Louisiana King Cake, an American version of Roscón doused in sprinkles for Mardi Gras.]

Since bread-making has become my new thing lately-- so far I've made two pizzas, 5 loaves of 100% Whole Wheat Bread and all but one have been light, sweet, and very good, two loaves of beer bread, and two loaves of something that wanted to resemble a baguette but wasn't sure how-- now I'm going to enter that netherworld of the cake-bread hybrid. Luckily, I'm not starting with the ones I know and love, the ones from home for which I have high expectations that can never be met (its me, not the recipe, take for example my disastrous experience with Sazón, the Puerto Rican restaurant that although good, wasn't up to snuff with my expectations; even the coffee I make here doesn't taste like coffee back home even though my mom ships me Yaucono and my favorite gourmet stuff that comes straight from the plantations in Yauco and Lares). When entering undiscovered territory you might as well go all the way so I'm starting in Mexico, with a tablespoon of anise seeds.

Simplicity, simplicity

While French and American haute cuisine has embrace a culture of complexity when it comes to food- reductions, confits, exotic ingredients, strange parts of an animal you didn't even know you could eat- there's been more than a few place that I've visited recently where what has prevailed is simplicity over engineering. Among them Momofuku Milk, Egg, Una Pizza Napolitana, and even 11 Madison Park, although the latter isn't as clear-cut as the others.

Momofuku is a dessert restaurant in the East Village that is part of the other Momofuku restaurants including Ssam bar (rated one of the top 50 restaurants in the world), Momofuku Noodle bar, and Ko. At Momofuku milk you have a wide range of desserts from cookies to cakes and pies, bread, milks, and if you're looking for savory, pork buns and beer. The kitchen is visible from the standing-only tables and the smell of sweet dough and cookies slowly baking is thick in the air. In the evening the line rivals that around Magnolia during the summer tourist season. The first two things I ever tried there set the tone for me and established it as my favorite dessert restaurant: cornflake and marshmallow cookie and cereal milk. I'd heard about this new trend that was happening among the pastry chefs in New York of incorporating breakfast flavors into desserts and breakfast being my favorite meal of the day, combined with a massive sweet tooth, this was heaven. The cereal milk was the remnants of a satisfactory bowl of Frosted Flakes and the cornflakes cookie was perfectly crispy around the edges and gooey and thick in the middle. They somehow manage to do this with all their cookies. But the cakes pushed it even further. Each is a three story affair with a distinctive identity- chocolate cake, chocolate chip cake, banana cake- but it's the small layer of filler in between each of the layers that demands to be heard. The banana cake, which my friends got, almost made me cry it was so good. The cake itself is soft and in between the layers of soft banana cake were gravelly sweet layers of cinnamon and brown sugar. This was repeated in the chocolate chip cake where layers of passion fruit offset the classic vanilla cake with chocolate chips embedded. Their most successful pie, though, is also one of the simplest things: crack pie, or just pie, the kind of pie people made when you couldn't afford to mix fruit and frills in with the butter and sugar mix. A sweet oat crust with a simple filling. Works every time. I could go on about their soft serve (last time I went they had Sour Gummy and Fireball as flavors) and the rest of their repertoire but I think the examples say it all. These are classic simple flavors reinvented within another very recognizable and accessible form. 

Egg is a variation on the idea of simplicity because unlike Momofuku Milk it doesn't strive to reinvent so much as excel. Their food is classic Southern cooking with fresh, seasonal ingredients produced locally (like their cheddar cheese and brioche) or grown upstate. While their dinner crowd is still rather (thankfully) thin, their breakfast and brunch crowd waits almost an hour for a table in their narrow dining room. I hate waiting for table. It makes me irritable and generally makes me more aggressively critical of the food. But Egg although always a wait in the morning is entirely worthwhile. The Egg Rothko (brioche with an egg cooked inside a hole in the middle and smothered in cheddar cheese with a side of either meat or seasonal vegetables and some roasted tomato) and the Grits and Eggs (also with a side of either vegetables or meat) astound because of their precise, fresh flavors that are so simple their natural complexity is brought out. This is even true in the coffee they serve, always in a french press with lots of grounds, the coffee is very flavorful and rich, even thick if that can be achieved with french press. During lunch their half-pound, grass-fed beef burger is pretty much the best burger I've ever had. When you ask for medium rare that's what they give you and the seasoning of the meat complements it rather than overwhelming the flavor of the meat itself. Skip the french fries, though you probably won't be able to. Recently they've also started serving wine and beer. They stock some local brews including Brooklyn One which gives continuity to their philosophy of fresh and local. For dinner, the duck and dirty rice still haunts me, although I can't say they have the best corn bread (Peter's takes the award for that) butvtopped with kale it becomes something else. Their mac and cheese is excellent (anything with cheese you have a good shot with) as are their biscuits. You will never leave Egg hungry and you will never regret having a meal there. As one chef put it when asked how he taught his child to eat well, if he made a macaroni and cheese with four cheeses and bread crumbs, it may be more fattening that your out of the box M/C but the ingredients are real, it is more wholesome. That's Egg in a nutshell. Basically you know you're eating something good.

I've already discussed Una Pizza Napolitana in my previous posting so take a look, it's a similar idea to Egg's just boiled down even further.

As for Eleven Madison Park, you could almost say the simplicity of their food is relative. Relative to other restaurants of their caliber that use more complex ingredients and preparations (and I'm sure 11 MP does too in certain dishes) but their was a great deal of simplicity in a lot of the dishes. Slow-poached egg with asparagus was bright and interesting, the Atlantic Halibut tasted like halibut with lemon and capers, even the duck had a simple symphony of lavender, honey, and rhubarb to offset the fattiness, but the red, soft meat still stood out among the undertones. The best dessert was the Tahitian Vanilla Souffle with Passion Fruit that beat out the intensely chocolatey Symphony No. 2 and the Cherry Crumble (that one was interesting, the cherries were sour and intensely sweet, almost like candy except for the texture). But their were little things served aside that really stood out for me. A bite-sized roll of cucumber and salmon that simply jumped out at you, the cucumber wet and sweet with a blast of salmon flavor packed into a pink square one square inch in size. An olive and rosemary bread, smaller than a normal rolls, served with either goat's milk butter and unsalted cow's milk butter with salt on the side (the separation of the salt and butter made a huge difference in the flavor). And finally, these small cookies you get at the end, with a flaky crust and a half inch layer of creamy filling, with flavors ranging from rose to peanut butter and jelly, those two in particular being the stand outs of the crowd. They're very small and anything but one note. The rose in particular was complex and unexpected, sweet with a flavor you're not used to, unlike the violet that definitely tasted of chocolate. I can't even talk about the wine.

Flowers might seem like something you wouldn't categorize as "simple" but they're as simple as it gets. Like when you have breakfast for dessert, the difference is you're experiencing something familiar in a different way. This is the testimony of complex culinary experimentation but the foundation of that is simple, fresh ingredients with classic preparations that take something ordinary and push it further, done especially well when it's an almost obvious direction you wouldn't have expected it to go in.

Brisket Moist

Despite what my friend Eissa said, I decided to republish my "journal-like" postings because they are actually helpful to me. I will try to be more anecdotal and less meditative. My plan for dinner tonight: Honey Biscuits, Salmon Patties, and Peas and Carrots with butter, half a bottle of wine from the Texan place I went to with R last night.

This Texan place was weird. Of all the dining that there is to be had in NYC, this particular restaurant is not one I would be particularly prone to visiting... ever. But I did. Yesterday I was fatigued, overfed, in a bleh mood, so of course as soon as R comes out of class: "Can we go get comfort food?"

In an ideal world, I should've convinced him to go to Egg, in Williamsburg. The duck with dirty rice and a side of biscuit was calling to me. Or at the very least Peter's where the mac and cheese would share a plate with spinach and ocra- vegetables!!! But instead I decided to trust in R's, "I know a perfect place near where I work." I thought he meant Comfortable Food, which looks really chic (it was where Andy and her bf make up at the end of Devil Wears Prada) and I was down for that. Really my priority was wine. But in any case... after we trek it up to 26th st. complaining about what a waste we both are... We walk into what looks like an old Texan salon, with a large flag of Texas painted on the back wall. It's cafeteria-style, like Katz's Deli, so we get out little cards where the servers note down what we've ordered and which we hand in to the register at the end when we're going to pay. We pick up a Shiraz from Texas (didn't even know Texas produced wine, it was sweet, but not bad) and R gets a ginger ale, served to him in a glass jar. Behind the bar, in little niches in the wall are jars and jars full of bottle caps, mostly from beer bottles but also from sodas. I watched one of the waitresses uncap some beers and toss the caps into an almost full bottle and decided, OK, this place can grow on me for the time being. We went on to the next stations.

While R got our Brisket Moist (we really should've gone for the Brisket Lean but more on that later), I went for some sides. I quickly decided against the farmer's salad in favor of the sweet potato bourbon mash, along with some green bean casserole and some corn bread. Meeting back with R, the brisket was wrapped in paper and in a basket. We opted to go to the downstairs dining room where it was quieter and less packed.

The brisket, as you can imagine, was dripping with grease and sported a layers of pink fat. It was barely warm and even barbeque sauce wasn't really helping it. The fat was what was killing it for me because the meat itself was soft and tasted all right.  Like brisket. The sides were much better. The mash was stringy, so you could tell it was made from real sweet potatoes, the corn bread was tasty (not quite Peter's but good enough), and the green beans were awesome. The beans, cheese, crunchy onions, and mushrooms were creamy and tasty and rich. 

When we left I felt a contradictory sensation: my legs felt heavy and I really wanted to levitate. Not standing up but just lie down on the air and float. So much food. It amazes and appalls me that people eat like this regularly. Or at all, really. I love a good steak and I understand the benefits of fat when it comes to flavor, but I don't understand eating grease-dripping meat with a layer of fat. There's no subtlety, no mystery, everything is out there and for the taking. Which I guess appeals to some people. But then think about your arteries for god's sake. Specially since after a meal like that, there's nothing else to be done but to go lie down and sleep.

Which is what I did. My stomach's not been happy with me lately and my energy level has been through the floor. I remember why I never liked spring. OK, almost, 7, what am I still doing here?

Peace.